[en] The French-speaking right wing in Belgium has always granted a paramount place to France in its ideological cosmography. The concept of everlasting France, of her “mission”, of the part she could play on the international scene are topics wondered about constantly in intellectual and middle-class circles. The thirties and mostly the Popular Front era provide the Conservatives with a splendid opportunity to describe the future of their cultural icon with awe: the more the international context is threatening, the more France seems to have become fragile, isolated and going down the slope. Using the news given by the national papers or the widely circulated Parisian press, right-wing Belgians brood, of course, about the eclipse of France’s might, but point chiefly to the moral crisis as its cause. Very often they feel some nostalgia for the “Ancien Régime” and see the origin of the worrying current phenomenon in the hated French Revolution.
Lot of factors are intertwined in the definition of the moral decay, but some are particularly highlighted. France is accused to be invaded by foreigners (their Jewish origins and Marxist creeds being stressed); Free-Masonry has a bad influence, as well as laic teaching, perverting youth by its pacifist and internationalist leanings. The degeneration of the religious spirit is lamented on account of its influence on the birth rate: the “Elder Daughter of the Church” gets emptier and emptier, whereas the populations of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany are blooming. Opposition to parliamentary system is to the fore, as the politico-financial scandals, the governmental instability, the disreputable ways of the politicians themselves contribute all to the idea of the moral crisis. A cultural decline is parallel, with a loss of spirituality in the French society, engulfed in materialism and coarseness.
Their stinging attacks, their bombastic style show how deeply rooted is the “decay of France” thesis among Belgian Conservatives. Beyond the French case, they fear a possible contamination of Belgium and the disappearance of their own traditional but vanishing values. Their fears and frights have certainly played a part in the 1936 turn-around towards the so-called Belgian “politique d’indépendance” in foreign affairs.